At the present time, various types of automatic timer devices are in wide use in many households as well as in industrial installations. These timer devices are used for a variety of purposes, but an extensive commercial usage has developed for timers in homes for turning night lights on and off and for, in general, indicating that the home is inhabited even though it is vacant at such time. These automatic timer devices are believed to be effective in deterring criminals from breaking into the homes, but most of the timers now available are subject to the fault or problem that they operate at exactly the same time on a 24 hour cycle basis so that if a person is observing the house, such cyclical nature of the actuation of the lights in the home might well be observed. Hence, a potential burglar might see that the house was unoccupied and that some automatic power supply unit was present to provide the illusion of home occupancy.
Various patents have been proposed heretofore on different types of timer constructions and some of them include U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,823,280; 3,997,742; 4,029,918 and 3,925,629 as being typical examples of prior timer constructions. Yet another timer switch assembly is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,935,404 wherein the assembly utilizes a motor coupled to a randomizing drive element which is periodically disconnected from the motor and switch at fixed time intervals and permitted to rotate to a random position. This controls the interval between switch closing and opening and to make the same random. Seemingly, no control exists in the person designing the timer to know exactly what types of timing cycles will be provided by a particular unit.